GAS.

Tom Philpott has the tough, tough job of reporting from the Terra Madre slow food conference in Turin, Italy. My heart goes out to that brave reporter. While there, he was rather impressed by a presentation from Vandana Shiva, a member of the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture. He relates this point in particular:

Shiva made what I found to be a novel and powerful point about livestock's contribution to greenhouse gases, recently documented by the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization: If you're going to take animals off of pastures, deprive them of their native foods (i.e., grass for cows, bugs for chickens, whatever the landscape offers for pigs), and feed them a diet heavy on beans (i.e., soy), they're going to get gas -- literally, greenhouse gas (methane).

Yep. We're back to cow farts. But we have a lot of cows! Billions (maybe)! And methane is 30 times more potent than carbon! And to tie it back in to this blog's normal hobbyhorses, because of farm subsidies, we feed corn to animals built for grass, then we pump them full of antibiotics to manage the resulting illness and hold our noses as their bodies try to digest the unexpected diet. The result? A lot more in the way of greenhouse gases and environmental damage. Which is how putatively serious policy bloggers end up writing about farts.